Olympic Brand Sponsor Tracker Ranks Brands in a Virtual Foot Race

In a creative effort to identify which Summer 2012 Olympic Games sponsors are generating the most social video buzz, Unruly Media created an interactive Brand Tracker tool that tracks the 25 Olympic Games brand sponsors in “a race for advertising glory.”

You can check out the embedded interactive infographic below. Just click the “Start Race” button to watch the leading brands race down the track. The top three finishers take their spots on the winners’ podium at the bottom of the chart when the race is over.

This is not only a useful tool to identify which brands are getting the biggest boost from their Olympic Games sponsorship investments, but it’s also a clever way to track brand buzz related to social video sharing in near real-time (the tool is updated every 12 hours). The data used to create the Unruly Media viral video chart comes from the Twitter and Facebook APIs as well as Unruly Media’s proprietary blog scanning engine, which tracks links and embeds of video ads from multiple sites.

You can drill down to specific video ads that are driving the most buzz using the viral video chart, too. Just click on any of the three brands on the winners’ podium at the bottom of the chart to view the top three ads for each brand that are getting the most buzz. You can even click on the ads to watch them and view graphs that show sharing trends for each ad. As I write this article, P&G is far in the lead followed by EDF and BMW in second and third place, respectively.

Small technology companies excel at creating clever tools like Unruly Media’s viral video chart. Imagine how your brand could come up with similar interactive and fun tools to tell your brand story!

Susan Gunelius is the author of 10 marketing, social media, branding, copywriting, and technology books, and she is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a marketing communications company. She also owns Women on Business, an award-wining blog for business women. She is a featured columnist for Entrepreneur.com and Forbes.com, and her marketing-related articles have appeared on websites such as MSNBC.com, BusinessWeek.com, TodayShow.com, and more.
She has over 20 years of experience in the marketing field having spent the first decade of her career directing marketing programs for some of the largest companies in the world, including divisions of AT&T and HSBC. Today, her clients include large and small companies around the world and household brands like Citigroup, Cox Communications, Intuit, and more. Susan is frequently interviewed about marketing and branding by television, radio, print, and online media organizations, and she speaks about these topics at events around the world. You can connect with her on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google+.

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